


The Hive

by doctornerdington



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Based On Poetry, Edgar Lee Masters, F/M, Free Verse, M/M, Poem Cycle, Spoon River Anthology - Freeform, shameless self indulgence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23809600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctornerdington/pseuds/doctornerdington
Summary: In 1915, Edgar Lee Masters published The Spoon River Anthology, a poem cycle about the fictional inhabitants of a small town  describing their lives after they've died. It’s one of my favourite poetic works. This is a fusion of the BBC Sherlock characters with Masters' concept and form. It's canon compliant (sort of), on the understanding that the events of the narrative took place in the early 1900s.Imagine, if you will, that all of the characters we know and love have now passed on. What would they tell us from beyond the grave...?
Relationships: James Sholto/John Watson, Mary Morstan/John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/Janine, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	The Hive

THE HIVE

Suppose there is nothing but the hive:  
That there are drones and workers  
And queens, and nothing but storing honey—  
(Material things as well as knowledge and wisdom)—  
For the next generation, this generation never living,  
Except as it swarms in the sun-light of youth,  
Strengthening its wings on what has been gathered,  
And tasting, on the way to the hive  
From the clover field, the delicate spoil.  
Suppose all this, and suppose the truth:  
That the nature of man is no greater  
Than nature's need in the hive;  
And you must bear the burden of life,  
As well as the urge from your spirit's excess—  
Well, I say to live it out like a god!  
For God is nothing but gravitation  
And oblivion the destination.

MICHAEL STAMFORD

Only the doctor can tell, and not always the doctor,  
What will result from compounding  
Fluids or solids.  
And who can tell  
How men and women  
Or men and men will interact  
On each other, or what will result?  
There were John Watson and Sherlock Holmes  
Incendiary from the first;  
Stifled by their fear of it.  
There were John Watson and his wife,  
Good in themselves, but evil toward each other;  
He oxygen, she hydrogen,  
Their marriage, a devastating fire.  
I Stamford, the doctor, a mixer of chemicals,  
Killed while making an experiment,  
Lived unwedded.

MYCROFT HOLMES

After you have enriched your mind  
To the highest point,  
With books, thought, suffering,  
The understanding of many personalities,  
The power to interpret glances, silences,  
The pauses in momentous transformations,  
The genius of divination and prophecy;  
So that you feel able at times to hold the world  
In the hollow of your hand;  
Then, if, by the crowding of so many powers  
Into the compass of your soul,  
Your soul takes fire,  
And in the conflagration of your soul  
The evil of the world is lighted up and made clear—  
Be thankful if in that hour of supreme vision  
Life does not fiddle.

How many times, during the forty years  
I served you, friends of Baker Street,  
Did you neglect the needful acts,  
And leave the burden on my hands  
Of guarding and saving.  
Sometimes because you were ill;  
Or careless of your welfare;  
Or you drank too much and fell asleep;  
Or else you said: "He is our protector,  
All will be well; he fights for us;  
It is his purview."

And often you asked me  
"How can you connive with the evil in the world?"  
I am out of your way now, brother,  
Choose your own path and call it good.  
For I could never make you see  
That no one knows what is good  
Who knows not what is evil;  
And no one knows what is true  
Who knows not what is false.

IRENE ADLER

I know they tell that I snared souls  
With snares which bled men to death.  
And all the men loved me,  
And most of the women hated me.  
But suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes,  
And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions,  
And the rhythm of Wordsworth's "Ode" runs in your ears,  
While others go about from morning till night  
Repeating bits of that common thing;  
"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"  
And then, suppose;  
You are a woman well endowed,  
And the only way law and morality  
Permit you to have the marital relation  
Is the trap of marriage and of children  
And you are filled with disgust  
Every time you think of it?  
That's why I lived the way I did.  
And I found love with one  
And took pleasure with many others.

JOHN WATSON

Whoever thou art who passeth by  
Know that my mother was kind,  
And my father was violent,  
While I was born the whole of such hostile halves,  
Not intermixed and fused,  
But each distinct, feebly soldered together.  
Some of you saw me as kind,  
Some as violent,  
Some as both.  
But neither half of me wrought my ruin.  
It was the falling asunder of halves,  
Never a part of each other,  
That left me a lifeless soul.

Now I, an under-tenant of the earth, can see  
That the branches of a tree  
Spread no wider than its roots.  
And how shall the soul of a man  
Be larger than his fear?

CHARLES AUGUSTUS MAGNUSSEN

I grew spiritually fat living off the souls of men.  
If I saw a soul that was strong  
I wounded its pride and devoured its strength.  
The shelters of friendship knew my cunning  
For where I could steal a friend I did so.  
And wherever I could enlarge my power  
By undermining ambition, I did so,  
Thus to make smooth my own.  
And to triumph over other souls,  
Just to assert and prove my superior strength,  
Was with me a delight,  
The keen exhilaration of soul gymnastics.  
Devouring souls, I should have lived forever.  
But their undigested remains bred in me a deadly nephritis,  
With fear, restlessness, sinking spirits,  
Hatred, suspicion, vision disturbed.  
I died at last with a single shot.

MARY WATSON

We quarreled that morning  
For he was never mine, and I was angry  
And I was nervous and heavy with the child  
Whose birth I dreaded.  
I thought over the last mission given me  
By that secretive agency  
Whose betrayal of me I had concealed  
By marrying this cold man.  
Then I took morphine and sat down to read  
Across the blackness that came over my eyes  
I see the flickering light of these words even now:  
"Verily I say unto thee, soon thou shalt  
Be with me in paradise."

HARRIET WATSON

Over and over they used to ask me,  
While buying the wine or the beer,  
In Islington first, and later in Hackney,  
Shoreditch, Camden Town, Stepney, wherever I lived  
How I happened to lead the life,  
And what was the start of it.  
Well, I told them a smooth tongue,  
And a promise of marriage from a rich man—  
(It was to escape, you see).  
But that was not really it at all.  
Suppose a boy steals an apple  
From the tray at the shop,  
And they all begin to call him a thief,  
The editor, minister, judge, and all the people—  
"A thief," "a thief," "a thief," wherever he goes  
And he can't get work, and he can't get bread  
Without stealing it, why the boy will steal.  
It's the way the people regard the theft of the apple  
That makes the boy what he is.

GREGORY LESTRADE

I WENT UP and down the streets  
Here and there by day and night,  
Through all hours of the night working for victims: the poor and the hurt.  
Do you know why?  
My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.  
And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them.  
Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the day of my funeral,  
And hear them murmur their love and sorrow.  
But oh, dear God, my soul trembled, scarcely able  
To hold to the railing of the new life  
When I saw Sherlock Holmes behind the oak tree  
At the grave,  
Hiding himself, and his grief!

VICKY

The secret of the stars—gravitation.  
The secret of the earth—layers of rock.  
The secret of the soil—to receive seed.  
The secret of the seed—the germ.  
The secret of man—the sower.  
The secret of woman—the soil.  
My secret: under a Mound that you shall never see.

SEBASTIAN MORAN

He took my strength by minutes,  
He took my life by hours,  
He drained me like a fevered moon  
That saps the spinning world.  
The days went by like shadows,  
The minutes wheeled like stars.  
He took the pity from my heart,  
And twisted it to hate.  
I was a hunk of sculptor's clay,  
His secret thoughts were fingers:  
They flew behind my youthful brow  
And lined it deep with pain.  
They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,  
And drooped the eye with fear.  
My soul had entered in the clay,  
Fighting like seven devils.  
It was not mine, it was not his;  
He held it, but its struggles  
Modeled a face he hated,  
And a face I feared to see.  
And when we died he haunted me  
And has not yet ceased.

TOM

To all I met I seemed, no doubt,  
To go this way and that way, aimlessly.  
But here by the trees you can see at twilight  
The soft-winged bats fly zig-zag here and there—  
They must fly so to catch their food.  
And if you have ever lost your way at night,  
In the dark wood of Regent’s Park,  
And dodged this way and now that,  
Wherever the light of the stars shone through,  
Trying to find the path,  
You should understand I sought the way  
With earnestness, and all my wanderings  
Were wanderings in the quest.

PHILIP ANDERSON

My parents thought that I would be  
As great as Faraday or greater:  
For as a boy I studied hard  
And made experiments and plans  
And careful models of the human form.  
But then I came of age  
And had to live, and so, to live  
I took employment in my field.  
And a few kind souls believed my genius  
Was somehow hampered by my wife.  
It wasn't true.  
The truth was this:  
I did not have the brains.

MOLLY HOOPER

To love is to find your own soul  
Through the soul of the beloved one.  
When the beloved one withdraws itself from your soul  
Then you have lost your soul.  
It is written: "l have a friend,  
But my sorrow has no friend."  
Hence my long years of solitude,  
Trying to get myself back,  
And to turn my sorrow into a supremer self.  
Oh, ye souls who have made life  
Fragrant and white as roses  
From earth's dark soil,  
Eternal peace!

HENRY BASKERVILLE

You never understood,  
O good detective,  
Why it was I repaid  
Your kind attention and delicate ministrations  
First with diminished thanks,  
Afterward by withdrawing my presence from you.  
You had cured my diseased soul.  
But to cure it  
You saw my disease, you knew my secret fear,  
And that is why I fled from you.  
For though when our bodies rise from pain  
We kiss forever the watchful hands  
That gave us medicine, while we shudder  
For thinking of the medicine,  
A soul that's cured is a different matter,  
For there we'd blot from memory  
The soft—toned words, the searching eyes,  
And stand forever oblivious,  
Not so much of the sorrow itself  
As of the hand that healed it.

MAJOR SHOLTO

I was just turned twenty-one,  
And the Sunday-school superintendent  
Made a speech in Bindle's Opera House.  
"The honor of the flag must be upheld," he said,  
"Wherever it be assailed!”  
And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved  
As he spoke.  
And I went to the army in spite of my father,  
And served with distinction,  
And rose in rank,  
And followed the flag till I saw it raised  
By our camp in a desert in Afghanistan,  
And all of us cheered and cheered it.  
But there were flies and poisonous things;  
And there was the deadly water,  
And the cruel heat,  
And the sickening, putrid food;  
And the smell of the trench just back of the tents  
Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;  
And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;  
And beastly acts between ourselves,  
With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,  
And little enough comfort.  
A man must find it where he can.

We took our comfort, John and I together,

And all that followed were nights of fear  
To the hour of the charge through the blowing sand,  
Following the flag,  
Till I fell with a scream, in flames,  
And was ruined.  
Now there's a flag over me in London.  
A flag!

SHERLOCK HOLMES (I)

Well, Molly Hooper, your words were not wasted  
Your love was not all in vain  
I owe whatever I was in life  
To your hope that would not give me up  
To your love that saw me still as good  
Dear Molly Hooper, let me tell you the story.  
I pass the effect of my parents and brother;  
The sister whose madness gave us trouble  
And out I went in the world  
Where I passed through every peril known  
Of wine and worse, and joy of life  
One night, in a room in the worst den at the Docks  
I was shooting up with a black-eyed coquet  
And the tears swam into my eyes  
He thought they were amorous tears and smiled  
For thought of his conquest over me  
But my soul was soaring miles away  
To the days of our closeness in the labs.  
And just because you loved me no more,  
Nor thought of me, nor wrote me letters  
The reproachful silence of you spoke instead  
And the black-eyed coquet took the tears for his  
As well as the deceiving kisses I gave him.  
Somehow, from that hour, I had a new vision—  
Dear Molly Hooper!

KATE

I went to parties at Wiltons,  
And drank at the Eagle on City Road.  
One time we changed partners,  
Dancing in the moonlight of middle June,  
And then I found the Lady Adler  
Taking the man’s part—in trousers and tails.  
We were together for fifty years,  
At eighty-six I had lived enough, that is all,  
And passed to a sweet repose.  
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,  
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?  
Degenerate sons and daughters,  
Life is too strong for you—  
It takes strength to live!

KITTY RILEY

To be able to see every side of every question;  
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;  
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,  
To use great feelings and passions of the human family  
For certain designs, for cunning ends!  
To scratch dirt over scandal for money,  
And exhume it to the winds for revenge,  
Or to sell papers,  
Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,  
To win at any cost, to save your own life.  
To glory in the power of it!  
To be a writer, as I was.  
Then to lie here close by the river over the place  
Where the sewage flows from Baker Street,  
And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,  
And abortions are hidden.

ANTHEA

Observe the clasped hands chiselled over your chest!  
Are they hands of farewell or greeting,  
Hands that I helped or hands that helped me?  
And angels blowing trumpets—you are heralded, sir—  
It is your horn and your angel and your family's estimate.  
It is all very well, but for myself  
I know I stirred certain vibrations in London  
Which are my true epitaph, more lasting than stone.

MRS. HUDSON

Mr. Hudson, you know, was tossed from the army  
For his wickedness. And he had no pension,  
And stood on the corner talking politics,  
Or sat at home reading the dailies;  
And I supported us by taking lodgers,  
And attending. I learned the ways of people  
From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts.  
For things that are new grow old at length,  
They're replaced with better or none at all:  
People are prospering or falling back.  
And rents and patches widen with time;  
No thread or needle can pace decay,  
And there are stains that baffle soap.  
Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets—  
And I, who went to all the funerals,  
Know all of them.

WIGGINS

I staggered on through darkness  
There was a hazy sky, a few stars  
Which I followed as best I could  
It was ten o'clock, I was trying to get home  
But somehow I was lost  
And the lamps were not lit  
Then I reeled through a gate and into a yard  
And called at the top of my voice:  
"Oh, Fiddler! Oh, Sherlock Holmes!"  
(I thought it was his house and he would show me the way home.)  
But who should step out but Mr. Moran  
In his night shirt, waving a stick of wood  
And roaring about the wandering tramps  
And the trouble we make?  
"You drunken worthless fucker," he said.  
As I stood there weaving to and fro  
Taking the blows from the club in his hand  
Till I dropped down dead at his feet  
  


JANINE HAWKINS

When Sherlock Holmes ran away and threw me over  
I went to Bath. There I met a lush,  
Whose father just deceased left him a fortune.  
He married me when drunk.  
My life was wretched.  
A year passed and one day they found him dead.  
That made me rich. I moved on to New York.  
A gray-haired magnate went mad about me—  
So another fortune.  
He died one night right in my arms, you know.  
(I saw his purple face for years thereafter.)  
There was almost a scandal.  
I moved on, this time to Paris. I was now a proper lady,  
Insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich.  
My apartments near the Champs Elysees  
Became a center for all sorts of people,  
Musicians, poets, dandies, artists, nobles,  
Where we spoke French and German, Italian, English.  
I wed Count Navigato, native of Genoa.  
We went to Rome. He poisoned me, I think.  
Now in the Campo Santo overlooking  
The sea where young Columbus dreamed new worlds,  
See what they chiseled: "Contessa Navigato  
Implora eterna quiete."

SALLY DONOVAN

I was not beloved of the Yard,  
But all because I spoke my mind,  
And met those who transgressed against me  
With plain remonstrance, hiding nor nurturing  
Nor secret griefs nor grudges.  
That act of the Spartan boy is greatly praised,  
Who hid the wolf under his cloak,  
Letting it devour him, uncomplainingly.  
It is braver, I think, to snatch the wolf forth  
And fight him openly, even in the street,  
Amid dust and howls of pain.  
The tongue may be an unruly member—  
But silence poisons the soul.  
Berate me who will—I am content with these words.

LADY SMALLWOOD

I would have been as great as Palmerston  
But for the accident of birth that made me a woman.  
For there was the old, old problem:  
Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity?  
Then Lord Smallwood wooed me,  
Luring me with the promise of power,  
And I married him, giving birth to eight children,  
And had no time to think.  
It was all over with me, anyway,  
When I ran the needle in my hand  
While sewing the baby's things,  
And died from lock—jaw, an ironical death.  
Hear me, ambitious souls,  
Sex is the curse of life.

SHERLOCK HOLMES (II)

At first you will know not what they mean,  
And you may never know,  
And we may never tell you:—  
These sudden flashes in your soul,  
Like lambent lightning on snowy clouds  
At midnight when the moon is full.  
They come in solitude, or perhaps  
You sit with your friend, and all at once  
A silence falls on speech, and his eyes  
Without a flicker glow at you:—  
You two have seen the secret together,  
He sees it in you, and you in him.  
And there you sit thrilling lest the  
Mystery stand before you, revealed, and strike you dead  
With a splendor like the sun's.  
So it was with my John.

EURUS HOLMES

They called me strange, and ugly,  
For my brothers were strong and beautiful,  
While I, the girl child of parents who had aged,  
Inherited only their residue of power.  
But they, my brothers, were free to pursue  
Their wild ambitions, and I was not,  
To revel in the pleasures of their bodies, and I was not,  
To seek and gain great power, and I was not.  
Then I, the strange one, the girl,  
Resting in a little corner of life,  
Saw a vision, and it was terrible and sublime.  
Thus a tree sprang  
From me, a mustard seed.

JAMES MORIARTY

From the first  
The truth of others was untruth to me;  
The justice of others injustice to me;  
Their reasons for death, reasons with me for life;  
Their reasons for life, reasons with me for death;  
I would have killed those they saved,  
And saved those they killed.  
And I saw how a god, if brought to earth,  
Must act out what he saw and thought,  
And could not live in this world of men  
And act among them side by side  
Without continual clashes.  
The dust's for crawling, heaven's for flying—  
Wherefore, O soul, whose wings are grown,  
Soar upward to the sun!

I could crawl between the legs of the wildest horses  
Without getting kicked—we knew each other.  
On spring days I tramped through the country  
To get the feeling, which I sometimes lost,  
That I was not a separate thing from the earth.  
I used to lose myself, as if in sleep,  
By lying with eyes half-open in the woods.  
Sometimes I talked with animals—even toads and snakes—  
Anything that had an eye to look into.  
So I learned to talk to men.  
Once I saw a stone in the sunshine  
Trying to turn into jelly.

JOHN WATSON AND SHERLOCK HOLMES

There is something about Death  
Like love itself!  
If with someone with whom you have known passion  
And the glow of youthful love  
You also, after years of life  
Together, feel the sinking of the fire  
And thus fade away together  
Gradually, faintly, delicately  
As it were in each other's arms  
Passing from the familiar room—  
That is a power of unison between souls  
Like love itself.

**Author's Note:**

> I assume this will appeal to a rather small readership -- if you've stuck it out to the end, thank you for indulging me. My soundtrack to writing was Richard Buckner's extraordinary album The Hill. Check it out if you enjoy this sort of thing.  
> XOXOXOXO


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